Intense weekend of cinema

Actually, it has been a very lazy weekend.  It was a long one with Martin Luther King's birthday on Monday, which is a holiday here.  The weather has been glorious.  Starting off cool and crisp and sunny and staying sunny and warming up.  Over 70F yesterday.  We should have been off walking, perfect weather for it, but my leg/knee is taking ages to feel right again.

So we used the excuse to stay in bed late and read a lot.  Peter is completely absorbed in a Bill Bryson book 'One Summer: America 1927' and insists on reading bits out.  Apparently a lot happened in 1927.  Peter's so enthusiastic that I might have to read it though I've found Bill Bryson a bit too cheerful in the past. I've been catching up with the last two editions of the London Review of Books and read, in particular, an article about a writer Penelope Fitzgerald who's work I don't know at all.  It sounds interesting though and I've downloaded her first two novels on to my kindle.   We also ate in the yard twice...a great treat in January.

However, we did stir ourselves to leave the house.  On Saturday night we went to the cinema to see '12 Years a Slave'.  It was unmitigated sorrow and distress from start to finish.  Well, not really unmitigated...mitigated by great acting and photography...but misery just the same.  It was the story of a remarkable man, based on a book he wrote after his ordeal, but I was disappointed that it didn't add anything to what I already knew about slavery.  It would have been interesting to know what was going on inside the heads of the Texan audience.  The cinema was packed. 

On Monday night we went again to the cinema, this time to see 'Gravity' which many people have recommended to us.  The cinema was empty, most people having seen it already I imagine.  Anyway, we donned our 3D glasses with an open mind - our last experience of 3D, 'Gatsby', was sickening - and sat through 90 minutes of tension.  Yes, great filming, but once again we staggered from the cinema exhausted!

There are 20 screens at our local cinema, so plenty more opportunities to 'enjoy' a film.  And I realised, with a sinking feeling, that we went in an out of the cinema yesterday without remarking on the pervasive smell of butterred popcorn and the number of people armed with multiiple drinks and massive buckets of the stuff plus other snacks shouldering their way in through the screen doors.  At Cinema City we make do with a cool glass of Viognier!  However, at Cinemark the tickets for seniors are $4 each - that's less that £2.50!  Mustn't complain!

Talking of the African American experience, the South and Martin Luther King Jr, a friend on face book drew my attention to this piece about what Martin Luther King actually did.